Skin tone comparison! President Obama v. John Boehner v. leather chair (control group at left)
If you accidentally turned on football early, you might have seen President Obama rocking a joint session of Congress with his jobs speech last night. Here I should point out that I am not a trained economist. I am not even a gifted amateur. But regardless of whether the President’s jobs plan will actually create jobs, he finally put it in terms America needs to hear. Speaking of his, um, differences with the Republican party:
Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box. But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here—the people who hired us to work for them—they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.
Shit just got real. The rhetorical centerpiece of last night’s speech was “you should pass this bill right away.” It’s no Yes We Can—it’s not even a Win the Future—but it challenges the House and Senate in a way that foregrounds their intransigence. It also maybe acknowledged Obama’s willingness to be a one-term President. I’m still here for another year, he said like Dad when you are seventeen. The implicit threat was that, with less and less to lose, he is going to become a meaner adversary. And Boehner wept held his face completely motionless.
